Sunday, March 16, 2014

Today’s Idiom – Pay Through the Nose

Hi everyone,

A couple of weeks ago I began a new series
about idioms. The first idiom was “spill the beans”. As I told you, Americans (and other native English speakers) use a great
number of idioms. It makes the English language beautiful, varied and alive. If
you try to learn them, it is a great adventure. In this series within my blog,
I can show only a few idioms, but I’m going to introduce books, websites, and
video channels that can help you.

Today I’m writing about the idiom “pay through
the nose”. What does it mean? The explanation of this idiom is as follows:to pay excessively; to pay an exorbitant
price; to pay too much for something (usually + for); to pay too high of a price.

Let’s see this idiom in some example sentences:

If you want a decent wine in a restaurant, you
have to pay through the nose for it.If you bring a car into the city, you have to
pay through the nose for parking. (you can have the word 'it' here, but I think
it sounds better without it)I had to pay through the nose to stay at that fancy resort.I was looking for that toy for a long time. I finally found it even
though I had to pay through the nose for it.Don’t buy groceries at that supermarket. You’ll
have to pay through the nose. = You’ll pay more than they’re worth.We paid through the nose to get the car fixed
and it still doesn't work properly.

One of my favorite books (about American
idioms) is 101 American English Idioms by Harry Collis.

“Today we're going to go over the pronunciation
for the idiom 'to pay through the nose'. You might use this phrase when you are
talking about something that you've paid a large amount of money for. For
example, someone might say, I love your car and you might say, Yes, I paid
through the nose for it. Or, for example, I paid through the nose for my
computer and it broke in the first week. Another example: I'd like to live in Manhattan, but you have
to pay through the nose to live there. Pay begins with the unvoiced pp P
consonant sound and is followed by the 'ay' as in 'say' diphthong [eɪ]. Pay.
Through. The TH here is unvoiced th [θ], th, through. The R sound [ɹ] is
followed by the 'oo' as in 'boo' vowel sound [u]. Pay through. Pay through.
The. Here, the TH is voiced, and the schwa sound [ə] makes up the rest of the
word. Nose begins with the N consonant sound, followed by the 'oh' as in 'no'
diphthong [oʊ], no-, no-, and finally, zz, the voiced Z consonant sound. Nose.
Pay through the nose. The two stressed words in this phrase are pay, pay, or
paid if you are speaking in the past tense, and nose. You have to pay through
the nose.”

And now I have a question for you guys: do you
know other idioms with a similar meaning? If you do, please write it / them as
a comment here.

Hi Gardeniafly,

What can you add to this post?

To pay through the nose is kind of a funny expression now that I have
spent some time thinking about it. I was looking up the origin of this
expression and I found the following on this website.Origin: Comes from the ninth-century Ireland.
When the Danes conquered the Irish, they imposed an exorbitant Nose Tax on the
island's inhabitants. They took a census (by counting noses) and levied
oppressive sums on their victims, forcing them to pay by threatening to have
their noses actually slit. Paying the tax was "paying trough the nose."